CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Part Glass, Part Wilson, Part Film, Part Opera

By BERNARD HOLLAND

Published: April 17, 1998

LOS ANGELES, April 16—
''Monsters of Grace'' is a work of mysterious possibilities born of practical needs. Philip Glass wrote the music; Robert Wilson designed the scenes, and the words are from the 13th-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. But there is another co-creator. For want of a more precise term, call it machinery.

Although its audience sits in a theater in the customary way, looking toward a stage, this opera is a movie, but with live singers and instrumentalists in the pit. Not any movie, but 70-millimeter film in three dimensions. Spectators wear updates of the cardboard and plastic 3-D glasses that graced our drive-in culture 40 years ago.

''Monsters of Grace'' was offered as a work in progress on Wednesday night at Royce Hall on the University of California at Los Angeles campus. An experiment of stunning complication, it arrived unfinished and, by all accounts, the object of some unhappiness by its authors. Seven of the 13 scenes were computer-generated, the other six staged. This was not the original plan, but it may possibly be the final form.

Last-minute insight? The end of the money? Creative exhaustion? Who knows? Every fingernail of every hand, every light in every window, every blowing leaf in every tree is the result of people punching keys on computer keyboards. Putting 100,000 frames of film through many processes in six months' time was expensive and labor-intensive to the cracking point.

The mysteries of this new opera are in the widening and deepening of the theatergoing experience. The practicality is in the mobility of the equipment. Jedediah Wheeler, the producer, wants to take ''Monsters'' on the road and give America a crack at the Glass-Wilson experience. Only New Yorkers and a few Princetonians ever saw the original ''Einstein on the Beach'' and its several revivals in this country; a crew of 56 working three to four days in advance would have been needed at every location. Film and its accouterments are more portable.

The episodes of ''Monsters of Grace'' are disconnected and tell no story. Disembodied tubes or vessels lead to a giant amputated hand rendered so close that it might chuck us under the chin. Helicopters roam a gauzy Himalayan landscape. A table set with chopsticks hovers near. A polar bear lounges, a shoe drops, a snake slithers. Mr. Wilson's trademark crossing bars of light present themselves. (They hint at the intersection of time and space, he said at a pre-event panel discussion.)

To say that these images are of equal power would be optimistic, but a few inscrutably memorable Wilsonian moments survive, now enhanced by new machinery. In one, tract houses lie along a curving road with trees in the foreground. As our viewpoint descends, a bird crosses our line of vision, and then a boy pedaling an ancient bicycle appears and approaches. It is a scene of gravity and silence.

Mr. Glass's music has an unaccustomed softness, which at its best soothes but at times almost drawls. Electronic keyboards use samplings of traditional Persian instruments. A quartet of singers works from the pit using Coleman Barks's English translations for their text. Their conversational American tone I found inappropriate to the erotic and ecstatic poetry at hand.

''Monsters'' promises importance for a number of reasons. First is what it belongs to. The nostalgic world of 19th-century theater is abandoned; so, too, the identifications with high culture that have come to separate the opera from the show and the aria from the song. Among the current projects of Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser, makers of the film, is a three-dimensional ''Spiderman'' presentation for a theme-park ride.

The digital technology, first made famous in the movie ''Jurassic Park,'' derives largely from Silicon Graphics Inc. For those who wondered when classical music would get around to connecting with the rest of the world, this may be the beginning of an answer.

Also important here is how human faculties are stretched. Distortion is a necessary part of any theatrical experience. For some, distorting stage pictures and time frames is a way of explaining the real. For others, the unreal is an end in itself. In ''Monsters of Grace,'' machinery widens the unreality by doing what it does in other places: it extends the limits of the senses and the body.

For just as cars deliver people to a destination faster than feet, and telescopes reduce the need to squint, ''Monsters of Grace'' inflates and shrinks physical experience and lays it in our laps. Images of almost infinite depth (the kind every opera stage dreams of) have yet to be realized for these performances, and may or may not come later. The substituted scenes staged for Royce Hall used typical Wilson iconography to atypical jerry-built effect.

''Monsters of Grace'' runs at U.C.L.A. until April 26. What shape it will be in when it makes the rounds of its co-commissioners in the United States and Europe (the Brooklyn Academy of Music is one) depends on the resources its overextended creators can still muster. It is a brave encroachment into unexplored territory, and the promises make the disappointments worthwhile.

Photos: Robert Wilson's title drawing for ''Monsters of Grace,'' above (IPA), and the premiere audience viewing the 3-D film-cum-opera through glasses that recall drive-in days. (Patricia Lanza/LA Eyeworks)